


The Best of What Might Be

by gabolange



Series: The Best of What Might Be [1]
Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: Cliche, F/M, First Time, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 17:29:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9395723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gabolange/pseuds/gabolange
Summary: An unlikely first time.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pellucid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/gifts).



> Set early/mid S2. Cliches-as-excuses, OOC in some ways but certainly not others, nowhere near canon compliant but not precisely AU either.
> 
> pellucid remains the greatest beta in the world. She is also the person who asked for nun sex and who pointed out that this fandom is oddly bereft of cliches. For these reasons and many others, this one's for her. Any remaining errors are my own.

***

Lying is a sin. If that lie is to save face, save reputations, save all of them from scandal, it is no less a lie and no less a sin.

Drinking to the point of intoxication is a sin. If it wasn’t intentional, if she’d had no idea—if they had no idea—perhaps it is easily forgivable, but a sin nonetheless.

Drinking to the point of intoxication, sleeping with your colleague, and lying through your teeth to everyone about how you’d spent the afternoon, well, that is something she might find in some kind of dirty penny serial. And it is a set of sins that, if she is honest, Sister Bernadette has no intention of repenting. 

It had started innocently enough, she supposes. The church social ran long. The day was hot and despite the festivities the children were cross in the weather. Their parents shooed them out from underfoot, cajoling them to go play, at least be a bother somewhere else. One of the women pushed a glass of pink punch into her hand, with a, “Surely, you must be boiling in all that wool, Sister!” 

She was, and the drink was refreshing. She refilled her glass.

Doctor Turner stood beside her, smiling cheerfully. She liked his smile, she thought, the way when he was truly happy, his whole face lit with joy. His eyes crinkled and his dimples deepened and she couldn’t stop herself from smiling back. 

“Are you enjoying the party, Doctor?” she asked.

He shrugged. “It’s good to see Timothy enjoying himself,” he said. “And it’s nice to see you out and about, Sister.” 

Her glass had emptied again and he reached for it, pouring her another along with his. “Yes,” she said, sipping at the sweet liquid. “Though I wish we had more temperate weather.”

He peered down at her, and if she had to guess she would suspect he was trying to hold back a laugh. “Is that a complaint, Sister Bernadette?”

She pursed her lips, taking another swallow of her drink before responding. “We are grateful for all of God’s creation,” she said as primly as she could manage before looking up to meet his eyes. “But perhaps I would be more grateful for a break in the heat.” And, before she could stop herself, “Or a chance to take this blasted habit off for once.”

In an instant, the smile fell off his face, replaced by a look she couldn’t begin to identify, though in retrospect she thinks that was the moment when it stopped being innocent and started being something altogether _not_.

“Well,” Doctor Turner said, quickly finishing his punch, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

**

It took surprisingly little time to extricate themselves from the party. He checked idly to make sure Timothy was happily distracted, but somehow no one sought their attention as they stepped away.

And so she pushed open the door to the convent, stiller than usual with everyone out. She didn’t need to touch him to know he was close behind her on the stairs as she led him to her room. Her cell, and it looked like a cell, she thought, bare except for a cross and Bible and a simple spread thrown over the bed.

It was entirely incongruous that they should be here together, and Sister Bernadette smiled, turning to face him. He had closed the door behind him and stopped just inside of it, but she found him looking not at the meager accommodations, but at her. 

“It is cooler up here,” he said, and it sounded like he was giving her a chance to say no, to protest that this was a mistake, it wasn’t too hot and she certainly wasn’t about to—.

“It’s freezing in the winter,” she said then, as if talking about the merits of an old stone building with minimal heating would distract them from the way his fingers reached for her face, brushing up against the side of her wimple. He pushed it off and she reached up to unclip the bandeau securing her cap in place. Wisps of her hair floated around her face and he shifted his hands to twirl one around his finger.

“You’re blonde,” he said. 

Her cap fell to the floor. She didn’t correct him—not blonde, exactly, just a mousey, uninteresting brown—because then he threaded his fingers through her hair like loved it, whatever the color, and pulled her to kiss him.

It’s not that she hadn’t ever done this, but she certainly hadn’t done it lately, and never with anyone she liked nearly as much as Doctor Turner. The boys she had kissed in grammar school hadn’t tasted this good, hadn’t known what to do with their hands, had run off after a moment. Doctor Turner dropped his other hand to her waist and pulled her flush against him, making no effort to obscure his increasing interest.

She felt herself respond, letting the fingers of one hand wander into his hair while the other clutched him closer. The only thing she wanted was to be closer. 

And, she thought, to get out of the blasted habit.

With effort, she pulled back, grinning a little at the stunned look in his eyes. “It’s still very warm,” she said. “And you promised to help me out of this.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Is that what I said?”

She nodded, smiling—was this what it meant to flirt, to look coyly at a man? She had never done that before, she knew, but why? Because she hadn’t met this man? Because in this moment, devotion to God seemed a sorry excuse to miss out on this experience.

“Show me,” he said, the corners of his mouth twitching in amusement but still so serious in his intent. She drew his hands to the buttons at her shoulder. 

He unfastened her deftly, the simple clasps no match for trained hands, but she didn’t have time to dwell on that because he followed his fingers with his mouth. He kissed down her neck, pausing to suck at the skin where her neck met her shoulder, and she wasn’t sure if it was desperate or possessive or just something he liked, but she buckled at the sensation. 

“Oh God,” she said, and she didn’t care that she might be taking the Lord’s name in vain, because then the hand that wasn’t undoing her smock was on her breast, kneading, and it was all she could do to stay upright. She thought she had been warm in her woolens, but somehow she was warmer now, a new heat growing in her nipples and pooling between her legs. 

And there was so much more to come.

She fumbled for his tie, but whatever dexterity she possessed failed her and she found herself clutching helplessly at his collar. He seemed as unwilling to let go as she, but if they ever wanted to do this, it would be easier for him to undress himself. 

He wrenched his mouth from her neck and stepped back, making short work of his tie and waistcoat. As she watched, she found she loved him standing there in shirtsleeves and braces, but shortly found she loved more him standing there in nothing at all but that dear smile. He looked at her with desire and as soon as she had struggled out of her slip and laid her glasses aside, he was again beside her. 

This, she had not done before, but that didn’t matter now. She leaned into him, his erection pressed against her belly. He was so much taller than she was, she noticed, and she liked that, too. His hands were not idle, brushing against her buttocks, her breasts; all the places she was supposed to forget she had, he remembered with his fingers. 

She didn’t know what would happen next, but he did. He knew how to unhook her brassiere and let it fall between them, knew to back her toward the bed and how to let her fall so she didn’t hit her head. She thrilled that he would not be fumbling or unsure with her, and she grinned as she leaned up to kiss him.

She wrapped her arm around his back, pulling him down against her, refusing to stop kissing him, or perhaps it was he who refused to stop kissing her. He settled himself between her legs, hard against the thin cotton of her knickers, and pressed her down into the bed.

Her head rushed and she arched into him, some instinct that led her to shift her hips against his erection to bring it even more firmly against her. He gasped against her mouth as she did, and she wondered what this felt like for him. For her there was only want, so hard to articulate, because what did she want? All of him, pressed inside her, as if that was the only thing that could relieve this terrible, keening ache. She tilted her hips again and his free hand found her knickers and pushed them aside, impatient, fingers questing for—oh.

He curled two fingers into her, and that wasn’t something she had known to imagine, how his hands would work against her, how the scratch of his nails inside her could cause her to shiver and cry out. “Shh,” he said, perhaps peripherally aware of the party outside, of the time they didn’t have for this.

“Mmm,” she responded, because what words were there? She had long passed the moment where she might tell him to stop, would never tell him to stop, and she didn’t know what she wanted in this moment except, impossibly, more. 

He paused inexplicably to brush her hair off her face and kiss softly, love and lust mingled in his touch. She saw the request in his eyes, needing her surety and confidence if they were going to continue. 

She nodded and he withdrew his hand from her body, raising it to his mouth to suck at his fingers. She stared at that and he saw, pressing a finger to her lips. She opened her mouth and let his finger rest on her tongue, and had to smile, because she hated the taste but loved that he didn’t, another thing she couldn’t ever imagine unlearning. She swirled her tongue around his finger and his hips jerked against her. 

It was time and they hadn’t much time at all. He drew her knickers off, letting her kick them aside before he returned to her.

It didn’t hurt, exactly, as he pushed into her, too fast and too slow at once. But she had to breathe to relax, to allow it to happen without flinching. And then he rested there for a minute, giving her a chance to adjust, and he leaned down to kiss her, very gently.

But she didn’t want him to be still and canted her hips against his, and then he moved. It was everything described in her medical textbooks—wasn’t that a silly thought—except, of course for the way it felt when he scraped at her shoulder with his teeth, when he thrust into her again and again. She tried to keep up, lost in an explosion of sensation that she could not untangle, warm and wet and want.

And how could she want even more, when she wrapped her calves around his back and drew him even closer? How could the hard muscle of his shoulder beneath her palm, his ragged breath against her cheek leave her begging instead of satisfied? How could his shudder against her as he came inside her be less than the end of this?

He pulled back then and she could feel his penis softening against her thigh as he rested his head in the curve of her neck. She took a shuddering breath and he raised his eyes, peering into her face. He was searching for an answer to a question she couldn’t understand, and she uncurled her fingers from the bedspread to run them across his mouth. “What?” she asked. 

He seemed to have his answer and kissed her hand. “I want to show you something,” he said.

His smile faded into something altogether serious and he slid down the bed, kissing her breasts and her belly as he went. The warmth between her legs had not receded in their brief pause, and now it burned even more. He whispered against her skin, “Hush now,” before he pushed two fingers into her again and lowered his mouth to her clitoris.

“Oh,” she gasped, startled at this new sensation, his tongue pulsing against her, as he curled his fingers in that way she already loved. She felt his admonishment to quiet as a breath against her vulva, and she found her hips rising off the bed against his mouth. The want drove her knees further apart and her hands to his hair, grasping at him for whatever he could give.

There was a rhythm to his movements, a cadence she couldn’t hold, and soon she was unable to keep herself from moaning, desperate, and this was it, this was more, this was everything. At the next touch of his tongue and lips, she was flying.

**

She finds her way to the kitchen as everyone is cleaning up. He is there, his boy underfoot, full of stories about paper masks and made-up worlds. She can see that Doctor Turner pays attention to her arrival, notes that her habit and wimple are firmly in place, the band at her chin tugged perhaps more tightly than usual.

Fred is saying, “Wouldn’t you know, Mr. Templeton put a handle of whiskey into the punch. Thought it would knock me right out.” And she notices her headache, a residual tingling behind her eyes. She wonders if the fact that she didn’t know, hadn’t tasted it through the sugar, is excuse enough for the last hour. Surely not.

Sister Julienne approaches, quietly. “There you are,” she says. “Is everything all right? I was wondering where you had gotten to.”

Lying is a sin. But this lie is hers, theirs, to keep through whatever might come next, and she will not repent it. Besides, she thinks, it isn’t precisely a lie.

“I lay down for a while,” she says. “I needed to get out of the heat.” 

***


End file.
